The Beautiful Square
<p>In 1915, Kazimir Malevich painted his famous <em>Red Square</em> painting, more properly called <em>Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions</em> (1915). I think about how incendiary it must have been at the time, how arresting. How it prefigured the general collapse of figuration, of representation, into a single, glowing screen, an ultimate abstraction of life and death that is later taken up by PredPol, a predictive policing software company. How the <em>Red Square</em> is not even a square, but a slightly angled parallelogram. Particularly exciting is the way it, along with its sibling <em>Black Square</em> (1915), references Russian Orthodox traditions. In their colors, yes, but especially in the way they were originally displayed: hung high in the corner of a room, in the place that an icon painting would have traditionally been displayed. Malevich purportedly kept a small Black Square painting in the same sacralized part of his own bedroom until he died. Today, in the same spot, we install surveillance cameras instead…</p>
Authors: Rahel Aima
Curator: Nora Khan
Part of: Manual Override